Best Online Community Building Tools for Brands in 2024

Community management is all about engaging and managing your online community of customers. It calls for great customer service, timely responses to queries, creation of engaging content, and lively interactions. Moderating conversations and managing social media accounts are an important aspect of this. 

Communities create a sense of brand ownership. It offers opportunities for meaningful interactions with your customers. Monitoring trends and analysis of user feedback provides valuable insights. For instance, these can include your user community’s likes, dislikes, or sentiments. It helps your team to personalize offerings and craft your brand strategy.

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The purpose of brand community management 

Community management’s goal is to develop a sense of belonging for its users. At the same time, ensure a fascinating experience around your brand for members.

A brand community management initiative’s goals include:

• Encourage members to share experiences and views
• Develop strategies to grow and manage a community of followers
• Respond to customer queries, concerns, and feedback
• Build trust and relationships with customers as well as other stakeholders
• Develop and execute policies and procedures
• Create and share engaging content alongside activities. This keeps the community active, engaged, and boosts participation.
• Identify and engage with influencers
• Analyze data and report on community metrics to gauge community success 
• Identify and address conflicts and issues within the community
• Regulate community via rules and regulations

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Why do you need a tool to build a brand community? 

Software tools help you build and manage your online brand community with ease. These organized platforms enable your customers to interact and engage with each other. Community engagement tools help members to share ideas, thoughts, stories, experiences, and opinions. Useful feedback from user engagement gives you invaluable insights into your brand. 

Community development tools help brands open conversations with their customers. When your platform addresses user queries and concerns, it builds trust and loyalty. This is vital for building a strong brand community. Create and manage content, moderate conversations, and track engagement to achieve this goal. At the same time, continue to measure your brand community’s success. These must also include your community's security and compliance with data protection regulations.

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10 Best Tools for Online Community Building Platforms in 2024

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1. AtomChat

Whether you want to build a brand community for an online marketplace or a brick and mortar business, AtomChat is a great starting point. This platform's community chat builder is ideal to collaboratively engage with your user base. It enables possibilities like topic-specific community pages or group chats for events. The group chat plugin is also known for its seamless integration with most online applications and marketplace platforms. AtomChat's features like whiteboards and screen sharing enhances collaboration among your users. Community interactions and events come to life with the platform's in-app video conferencing capabilities. Multi-lingual integration with real-time translation means that your community is not restricted to interactions in English.

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2. MemberSpace 

MemberSpace enables you to create a members-only area on any page of your company website. You can even start a membership business—all with no-code. Compatible with most content management systems, its design is totally under your control. Create a paid community or sell digital products such as podcasts, online courses, and eBooks using MemberSpace. Seamlessly integrate a members-only section and a community forum with a Circle-like tool to enable user engagement. MemberSpace also allows monitoring of activity timelines and analytics.

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3. Khoros Communities

Khoros helps businesses connect with their branded communities and customers. It is known for great user experiences and the best online community building platform. Khoros ensures a secure and trustworthy environment for social engagement. It enables users to ask questions, find answers, gain knowledge, share experiences, and connect with like-minded people. Strengthen your brand, deepen existing relationships, and forge new ones with Khoros' robust features. Backed by a dedicated support team which powers more than 400 top brands, this platform can cut support costs, keep your customers happy, and boost revenues. 

4. Mighty Networks 

Mighty Networks enables you to turn your branded community into a vibrant online presence across devices. Its features include an activity stream, distinct groups, member categories, and private communications. The tool transforms your online brand community platform by enabling members to connect, share, and collaborate. Mighty Networks provides features to create content, manage conversations, and host events. You can customize your community with custom branding, colors, and logos. The platform offers analytics that tracks engagement and delivers insights to better understand your brand community.

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5. Vanilla Forums 

Vanilla Forums helps you engage with your branded community, fosters loyalty, drives sales, and enhances customer service. Known for its customer-centric solutions, the software helps your customers to post, view, and vote on ideas that spur innovation. With powerful plugins like ‘Mark as Troll’ that enhance the forum functionality, the software gives you tons of customizability options. Its rich community features include group management, member directory, content management, moderation, discussions, and ideation.

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6. Hivebrite 

Hivebrite is a visually appealing, multifaceted platform with customization choices. Used by top global companies, it is ideal to build, manage, and expand fully branded private communities. The community building tool’s features help you create, manage, and engage with your global branded community. You can fully customize the platform to manage memberships, analytics, reports, content, and events around your brand.

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7. PeerBoard

PeerBoard is a code-free plug-and-play software with a wide range of customization options. For instance, it includes custom themes, colors, and fonts. You can create a community forum with your own branding in terms of its look and feel using custom widgets, polls, and other features. Its powerful moderation tools keep your community safe, engaged, and on-topic. PeerBoard also offers analytics and reporting tools that help you better understand your customers and their needs.

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8. Tribe 

Tribe enables large corporations to build communities in the cloud. The software puts creators like you first and transforms brand-centric communities into business turbochargers. It allows complete control over the look and feel of your brand community, especially in terms of how it interacts with your business. You can use also use widget variations of components such as the activity feed, groups, and posts on your platform.

9. AnswerCart 

AnswerCart is a cloud-based community and forum management platform that serves small and medium-sized brands and businesses. Its clients include brands from finance, education, and technology verticals. Members can post articles, leave feedback, answer queries, and run polls on discussion boards. They can also upload files, embed media, chat privately with other members, and share forum content on social media. AnswerCart enables integrations with third-party programs such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Twitter, and Facebook.

10. Mobilize

A cloud-based event and community management software, Mobilize targets corporations, non-profits, and resellers alike. It features tools like shared calendars, email invitations, and local time zone support so that your members can plan and manage events. Regular emails and SMS messages can also have customizable reply permissions, embedded URLs, and CTA buttons. The platform offers networking tools, document storage, and discussion boards for groups. Users can control member permissions and privacy. Your brand community can participate via tons of content options such as conversations, suggestions, and private chats.

Ensuring the right fanbase

A brand cannot survive on its own like an island. This is where active communities play a vital role in the success of start-ups and companies alike.

There are many sector- and business-specific community management tools that enable your business to create dedicated followers. However, your brand’s success on this front depends purely on your clarity about business objectives.

You can harness the power of an engaged online brand community with the help of a tool that meets your needs. This will help you transform your business using game-changing ideas and interactions.

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